The Common Core debate returned to the Kansas Legislature on Wednesday with a hearing that brought back many of the same arguments made before the House Education Committee last year.

Scores of Common Core friends and foes crowded into a Statehouse room, and about 70 signed up to testify on the multistate mathematics and English standards that Kansas adopted in 2010.

A bill to ban the Common Core failed to pass the 2013 Legislature. A new bill would ban the math and English standards, in addition to the science standards.

Speakers against the Common Core, largely parents, told members of the committee it was watering down their children’s education, encroaching on local control of schools and leading to collection of sensitive student data. Some compared it to socialism or communism.

Speakers in favor of the standards, largely teachers and school administrators, argued they had opened a new chapter of rigorous, inspiring education that goes beyond rote learning, and that banning Common Core would violate the local control of school boards that support it.

Speaking before the hearing, Rep. Willie Dove, who introduced the bill, said everyone in the room wants the best for their children.

Asked about reports that he hadn’t read the Common Core standards, he said he had read parts but wasn’t sure of which subject.

Last year, the House Education Committee, chaired by Rep. Kasha Kelley, spent more hours on hearings and discussions concerning whether to scuttle the Common Core than on any other topic, according to a committee member.

Kelley said Wednesday she feels compelled to take up the issue because of the controversy in Kansas and across the country.

"We cannot deny that this issue needs to be addressed," Kelley said.

The two hours of testimony Wednesday included a statement from Ken Willard, of the Kansas State Board of Education, who said the board opposes the attempt to scrap its standards, but agrees with the intent behind another section of the bill concerning data privacy.

That part sets restrictions on sharing personally identifiable student data. The Kansas State Department of Education and state board say they protect student data rigorously and don't share identifiable data with the federal government, companies or researchers.

"The board has asked repeatedly and been assured repeatedly that we are employing every possible data security measure," Willard said.

He suggested a third part of the bill, establishing a panel to advise the board on standards, was unconstitutional. The Kansas Constitution says the state board supervises public schools. The 19-person panel would include parents and others appointed by lawmakers, the governor, the state board and the Kansas Board of Regents.

Megan King, a parent and member of Kansans Against the Common Core, which held a rally at the Statehouse earlier in the day, said the Common Core fails to align with high standards in countries like Finland and Japan as promised by proponents.

"These countries consistently produce the top-performing students in mathematics in the world," she said.

Jennifer McCoy, who said she has 12 children, all educated through private school, suggested the standards were being used at their schools, too, to their detriment.

"My children started struggling," McCoy said. "Before they did OK."

Pam Bevan, meanwhile, a principal from Hutchinson, called Common Core "the best thing that has happened to our children in the 26 years I've been an educator." Concordia superintendent Bev Mortimer said it pushes students to new levels of problem-solving and collaboration.

"We like to see those things," Mortimer said.

Gov. Sam Brownback has stayed out of the Common Core debate. Asked in November whether Kansas should drop Common Core, Brownback said he was studying the matter. An emailed statement from his office Wednesday didn't take a stance on the bill or the content of the standards.

"The governor is sensitive to the concerns regarding the overreach of the federal government into the education standards in Kansas," the statement said. "He will carefully review any bill passed by the legislature."

Common Core has been adopted in 45 states. Though it originated as a multistate initiative, critics claim the federal government, the Gates Foundation and companies pulled the strings behind the scenes, or that the federal government pressured or enticed states with Race to the Top grants and funding for Common Core tests.

Kansas' statewide data collection system targeted under the Common Core bill isn’t part of the Common Core standards but was funded in part by federal grants for student data systems. Kansas isn't a recipient of Race to the Top funds and turned down Common Core tests developed with federal dollars.

ADVISORY: Users are solely responsible for opinions they post here and for following agreed-upon rules of
civility. Posts and comments do not reflect the views of this site.
Posts and comments are automatically checked for inappropriate
language, but readers might find some comments offensive or
inaccurate. If you believe a comment violates our rules, click the
"Flag as offensive" link below the comment.

No one with any integrity has to comment on common core. It rewrites history, preconceives new history, and is a tactic that Stalin used quite well. I guarantee, neither I nor my family owned slaves, and yet I am responsible for slavery because I am white. Quite the contrary, members of the potato famine pestilence, many of us were enslaved in Great Britain during those times. Poor people unable to pay taxes. There is the key! Dumb me down history teacher, dumb me down...because as you write it common core, it ain't TRUE!

Major leaders in education Texas and Virginia saw through the sham from the get go. Alaska, Minnesota, Nebraska, soon to be joined by New York and Florida, have refused to hand their schools over to the fed. Kansas made a quick and thoughtless decision to sell out to federal curriculums.

Kansas was a national leader under Kansas Standards, to dumb it down is a disgrace. This indoctrinating garbage out of Washington must be stopped.

The Lawrence Journal has posted their taped interview with the author of this bill. Everyone should take the time to listen to Willie Dove's interview. I will not try to bias anyone by giving my thoughts on the interview, but you need to listen to it.

www.ljworld.com. The article is anyone can read the Common Core standards. Then there is a link to the interview in the article.

And American you are full of ignorance or outright dishonesty you do not even care to debate with facts.

See, this is a fact. Florida received 700 million dollars from Race to the Top grant money.

Please show facts that say Common Core is dumbing down the standards. Where are you finding this belief stated by qualified individuals?

Thanks for that site to listen to Willie Doves comments about the Common Core. He is totally clueless!! If that is his argument against Common Core, and he gets the legislators to pass it, then I know we are in REAL trouble with the legislators that we have. What a pitiful group they are with the exception of those working tirelessly to represent ALL Kansans.

Kansas is only average on the US tests. And we know the US is very low on the International tests. We rank in the mid-20s on math and science testsamong the developed nations. This is nothing to brag about. We are not a well-educated state population. For proof, read the daily conservatives' comments and you'll quickly learn the truth.

How can people like American continue to insist that black is white, apples are oranges and robins are horses, just because they want white and oranges and horses? Common Core started at the state level, data collection is part of something other than common core, and it has nothing to do with mind control!

It never ceases to amaze me how people can insist on fiction because they want something to attack. The world is flat, men never landed on the moon, and Common Core is and evil Obama plot.

Daniel Moynihan said, “You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.” If only people would think!

I am not too sure what factual data you have selectively chosen to base your comments and beliefs on, but you certainly have been either blind-sided or effectively believed only the information spoon-fed to you. To enter into a discussion regarding the Common Core initiative and to additionally appear oblivious to the concerns which have flooded the controversy regarding Common Core, suggests, to me, you may not be very well informed on this issue. This might explain why you seem to be struggling to understand the concerns posted by others.

The Common Core envelopes a massive amount of issues that can be addressed and to do so would fill up more space than anyone would care to sift through. However, I have extracted a variety of articles which outline some of the many concerns ranging from the origin of the Common Core philosophy, standardized testing, absence of trials and empirical data to support the efficacy of Common Core, the failed attempt of the largest to-date implementation of Common Core in the state of New York and the current controversy and joined efforts of teachers, parents and politicians to withdraw from Common Core, the political and funding origins that gave birth to the Common Core initiative, sample test questions extracted from the standardized test which allows the reader to answer the questions and receive their score along with comparative results.

The following links will provide the facts that have caused valid and legitimate concerns and facts that cannot be disputed which is what you have requested. While there remain many other issues, the information provided within the links below certainly are representative of the most prevailing of those issues. Hopefully, this will facilitate your knowledge base and assist in clarifying the serious concerns Common Core initiatives inherently pose.

First, I thank you for attempting to bring facts to the table. American and others only seem to shout slogans with no factual backing.

To address the issues pointed out by your links (assessments, lack of individual teacher input, perceived lack of teacher control over classroom curriculum, the textbook industry having a monetary windfall, and the state of New York basing teacher pay/evaluations on test scores), please understand that we live in Kansas.

The Common Core Are not assessments. If you will read the documents, you will see assessments are not part of them. The assessments come from NCLB and will not go away if KS were to revert to previous standards. Like the hysteria over longitudinal data surveys, this issue is not related to the standards.

Teachers in Kansas had just as much input as we always have when adopting/creating new state standards. I did not have direct input in the 2006 standard, which this bill would revert us to, so why would I have expected to have input on these standards. Melissa Hancock at KSU had as much input as she did the last time, just as other select KS educators did. Now if I wanted more input I could have made comments to the KSBE prior to their adopting the standards in October of 2010. Did you catch that 2010 part? That was a really long time ago. This Louisianna teacher could have done the same back when Louisianna adopted their version.

Speaking of Louisiana, did I tell you we lived in KS. The land of local control. No one from the state is going to try to tell me when or how to teach these standards. We just don't do that here. Some larger districts will try to top down it because of their size, but again that is a local decision. The ideal that the state, as a proxy of the federal government, is going to tell me when to teach which lesson and give me the materials to do it is so laughable. When I need direction on implementing common core, I go to other states departments of education website (like Ohio, Utah, etc). We are so broke at the KSBE I would never expect help from them.

I despise the textbook industry as much as the next, but they are a necessary evil. I do not have the time to write a textbook but I tend to want to have one to use. Prior to common core, my text would never align to our KS standards. KS is so small of a population that we never had our own textbooks based on state standards. This will be the first time in 13 years of teaching that my textbook is actually based on the standards that my state says the kids should be learning. I fail to see how that is a bad thing. Plus I finally get new books and don't have to keep taping the old ones back together.

Finally we live in KS, have I said that before? New York's issues with the common core have nothing to do with the actual standards. They have to do with how their state is implementing them and how their teachers are assessed based on test results. Giving tests to 1st graders? We don't do that in KS, giving bonuses based on test scores? I wish we did that in KS.

If you would like to find me critics of the actual common core standards, the words on the pages, then I would love to read them. What you gave me above does not dispute the fact that the Common Core standards are a step up in difficulty over the KS standards of 2006. I believe that is a good thing for our kids.

The bottom line is the fundamentalist, conservative, religious parents want the state to subsidize the home schooling of their kids or to pay for schools teaching their agenda. If that does not work, these same people want to defund the public schools so they do not have pay for other children's education.

Most parents with school-aged children can tell you why they chose their home. A preference for a particular public school district is usually involved.

School boards, district staff as decision-makers, the socio-economics of neighborhoods, and parental and community involvement all hold great sway over what occurs inside classrooms. Yet this truth about American public education continues to be degraded and denied by some members of the GOP, with the most recent example coming from Kansas.

The Republican state committee of Kansas passed a resolution this month asking the state to back away from implementing a set of standards, goals for education that are being adopted nationally. The GOP committee opposes the Common Core standards, pitching them as a type of power grab by the federal government for the minds of schoolchildren. Similar fear-mongering about the federal government’s impact in education is used to belittle other education reforms and to demean teacher’s unions.

Such persistent and unsubstantiated claims by some members of the GOP need to be silenced. There is only one way to attack this type of ignorance: with education. Wisely, that is the approach being taken in Kansas.

Education Commissioner Diane DeBacker will send a letter to GOP leadership this week to reiterate the lesson. And an education campaign is beginning for the public.

The move toward a set of standards for the goals of public education began not with the federal government, but with state educators, more than a decade ago. They recognized that having a hodgepodge of differing standards state-to-state was not sufficiently preparing the future workforce. Educators wanted to know how children in their state compared with others in achievement and to learn from states where students were excelling. Through years of collaboration, what are now termed the Common Core standards for reading and math were agreed upon.

Nationally, all but a handful of state education boards adopted the measures. Kansas did so in 2010. Then districts began embracing the standards, planning and training teachers because the way the standards are reached is a local decision.

One way to keep outrageous interpretations of benign ideas alive is to preach long and loud, confusing people so they can’t see through the verbal farce. Education is the answer. And it has begun in Kansas.

The corporate tax credit “scholarship” bill (which was defeated last year) is going to be heard in the House Education Committee on Friday, though it was not on this week’s calendar until Tuesday afternoon. Why are we not surprised? Because recently, Brownback's former budget director and current Kansas Policy Institute fiscal policy fellow Steve Anderson told us in the comments on this page,

“We could get 5000 kids out next year in Kansas using tax credit scholarships where people donate to a 501c3 and the scholarships go to those with lower than 185% of the federal poverty level (Medicaid eligible) I have donors ready to go and the private schools including the Catholic Diocese have vowed to make the seats available at $7000 a year tuition.”

We find it troubling that Mr. Anderson has engaged in negotiations to divert funds from the state general fund to private schools (which have no obligation to educate all Kansas children) while our public schools are being told there are insufficient funds to restore recession-era cuts.

But in the maelstrom that has surrounded the Common Core debate, that actually is not unusual. Many of the people who have spoken out against the standards during "citizens open forum" times at the Kansas State Board of Education have made similar comments. They either have no particular objection to the content of the standards, or haven't even read them. But they do object to the process that was used to bring them about — and especially the after-the-fact efforts by the Obama administration to encourage, or even pressure, states into adopting them.

So, for the benefit of anyone else who hasn't yet seen them, but would like to, here they are. And they are not that difficult to understand:

National advocacy groups powered by the Koch brothers and other conservative megadonors have found a new cause ripe with political promise: the fight to bring down the Common Core academic standards.

The groups are stoking populist anger over the standards — then working to channel that energy into a bold campaign to undercut public schools, weaken teachers unions and push the federal government out of education policy.

Americans for Prosperity, an advocacy group backed by the Koch brothers, is pressing similar themes in town hall meetings across the country.

A key battleground: Missouri, where conservatives are pushing to get measures promoting vouchers and ending teacher tenure on the fall ballot. Increasingly, the issues are being linked to Common Core. Concerned Women for America held a conference outside Kansas City, Mo., this weekend that opened with denunciations of Common Core and built to an address by state Sen. Ed Emery, a voucher proponent who has compared the current public education system with slavery because it traps students in government-run schools. Concerned Women, which is part of a Koch-backed network of conservative organizations, will hold additional seminars across the state this month.

The libertarian Show-Me Institute in St. Louis is also fighting Common Core — and sponsoring policy breakfasts in both St. Louis and Kansas City this month on the virtues of expanding school choice. Meanwhile, the institute’s president, retired investment manager Rex Sinquefield, has poured $850,000 of his personal fortune into promoting the ballot measure to end tenure. Missouri will also host a two-day conference devoted to attacking Common Core at the end of the month.

The federal government has no business or right in our children's schools. Of course the left is thrilled with the thought of our children being indoctrinated by big brother. The rush to grab on to any replacement for the failed NCLB has been a disaster. Kansas teachers and schools produced students that led the nation in scores under our state standards.

Why Kansas would sell out it's children and schools is absolutely astounding. Parents must contact their legislators now and end this sham before more money is wasted on this sham. Time to bring Kansas Standards back to the classroom.

...because private schools can exclude any individuals they choose.
They want to give private schools $7,000 per student but give
public schools less than $4,000 per student. This is another
attempt by the private schools to fund their schools and
teach their agendas at the expense of the public school system

Since we want to legislatate marriage, divorce, and every other aspect of people's lives with our "small" government, why don't they just propose a bill that requires women to stay at home and home school their children, that way they can teach them the right things (sarcasm there).

I also wonder if any of the legislators even have a clue what any of this is even about, or they just want to fight to fight, i sure wish i had a job where I didn't really have to read anything about what I am doing.

The Common Core standards are MUCH more rigorous than those previously adopted in Kansas. If any argument can be made that Kansas has tailed off in their performance, it would be because of the testing/punishments associated with NCLB and the OLD assessment system, not Common Core. If anything, Common Core is the perfect vehicle to get Kansas back to where we once were!!

"Kansas teachers and schools produced students that led the nation in scores under our state standards."

Show one reference that proves that Kansas students led the nation. This is some more of this right-wing wacko information. Kansas has never led the nation in any student testing category. If we drop common core, we will fall even firther behind.

Math curriculum is already failing, the governments attempt to focus on "word problems" is a failure in the classroom. Non existent Social Science standards, bogus proposed Science standards and a subjective reading agenda are all a path to failure in the schools.

No, many educators want CC out of the system because they care about their students and want them to succeed. The white ivory tower elites from government have never been able to write an effective and applicable curriculum.

Common Core in itself is not a bad idea, the problem is in the implementation of the program. Already in Missouri the KCMO school system has already implemented a sex education program that visually explains to 6 graders how "having sex" physically happens. The school system blames it on Common Core (CC), or the Federal Government neither of which have a standard that forces sex on 6 grade students. In reality people don't trust the school systems, the state or the federal government because they have done a miserable job in teaching our children. I think for Christian parents that have students in progressive schools systems that seem to go out of their way to teach active sex education to their children, CC does not work. What Common Core does that Bush's education program did as well is to teach the test. While Common Core does not yet have a common test to grade the "core," they are developing the test as we speak. Future implementation will include other subjects, as of now CC only speaks to English, Math and Science. Also school book printers have yet to accomplish writing a CC text. Most CC teaching is done from established textbooks.

The other problem that conservative parents are concerned about is the information that is taught. Already progressive history books are spending more time writing on pop culture instead of significant world or American history. They are also subjecting students to outright lies in history further implementing the progressive method of changing history that they are so well known to do (Saul Alinsky: tell a lie often enough where it becomes the truth)

If I ran the school system I would have teachers teach from original texts. If it be english, have the student read early american literature; history read books from the founding fathers; science, read original studies from scientists who discovered stuff. What teachers want is someone to do all the work for them. Put all the information conveniently in a text so all they have to do is tell the little guy or girl: read pages 34 to 42 and we'll discuss it tomorrow. Teaching is teaching, forming a lesson from your own discovery, not someone else's.

It is time for the Kansas Legislature to cry no more for the ChRINOs (Christian Retuglicans In Name Only). The Koch-funded KPI-led yesilature wants to give private schools $7,000 of tax money per student per year but at the same time give the public schools less than $4,000 per student.

Providing 75% more public tax-payer funding to private schools will doubtlessly have the desired effect of superior test scores for the hand-picked students in private schools - - - Private schools can choose to exclude any student that does not excel. This will lead to VERY inequitable educations; the result will be pitting the brightest top-scoring students in population centers with multiple private and charter school choices against ALL other students (including the bright kids in public schools in small rural districts).

Only political novices and idiots have failed to notice that almost all private schools in Kansas are run by Christian churches. The ChRINOs want taxpayers to fund religious indoctrination along with the rest of the students' education, and this is a way to get that while PRETENDING to honor the Constitutional requirement of separation of church and state.